Low Battery Notification

By Ekaj, 10 January, 2014

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps
Hi everyone. I've recently run into a problem and I'm wondering if anyone else is experiencing this. I did a search for this and couldn't find anything, but my apologies in advance if it is already here. My problem is that there doesn't seem to be a low-battery alarm, or if there is I don't know how to enable it yet. I asked my trainer about this when my mother and I were at the Apple store a couple days ago, but he didn't know how to enable it either. I managed to plug in my Mac last night and was able to hear the charging percentage by going to Menu Extras, but I did lose speech both on Tuesday night and then again on Wednesday morning. Tia for anybody's assistance on this.

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Comments

By Isaac Hebert (not verified) on Thursday, January 16, 2014 - 12:08

Try installing battery monitor it will notify you if you're battery is low.

By Ekaj on Thursday, January 16, 2014 - 12:08

Is that available in the App store? I'm also wondering if this is an accessibility issue which needs to be brought to Apple's attention?

By Roland on Thursday, January 16, 2014 - 12:08

I think I have seen a system dialog on my MBA mid 2013 warning me about low battery status in OS X 10.8. As far as I recall it was among the system notifications - same as calendar reminders etc. However, I can not confirm this for Mavericks either - I will look for it - provoke it.

By Ekaj on Thursday, January 16, 2014 - 12:08

I let my battery run all the way down to 1 percent this evening, and a notification popped up. But Voiceover still did not read the actual notification. I have tried changing the sound scheme to see if possibly I missed something, but no dice. I just assumed this was the low-battery notification, and flipped on the charger. I did see something about different phrases being spoken and I tried changing those a bit, but that appears to be unrelated. So perhaps I'm missing something here, or perhaps this is just an issue with Voiceover which needs to be addressed. In any case, I'm comfortable at least for the time being going into Menu Extras and manually checking battery status. I'm hopefully talking with my parents this coming week or next weekend about inputting credit card information so that I am able to get these software updates.
That's very odd. I let my battery run down nd it shows me a system notification at about 9 percent or sometimes it's 7 but it is there. I'll have to do some further testing. Take care.

By BlindEducator on Thursday, January 16, 2014 - 12:08

No, The battery monitor is $3.99 in the USA.

By KE7ZUM on Thursday, January 16, 2014 - 12:08

In reply to by BlindEducator

I'll have to look at my stuff, but there was an app that I used that had alerts and all of that stuff, and told you your battery temp and cycles used. It was free, but I can't remember what it's called. I'll have to again check apple vis or what not. Take care.

By Ekaj on Sunday, February 16, 2014 - 12:08

I'm revisiting this topic because I've done a little bit of further investigation into this. A sister of mine got an 11-inch Mac Book Air just last week, and she is also a Voiceover user. Nobody else in our area knows Voiceover, aside from the good folks at our Apple store. My sister said the guy helping them was very good, but just as with my experience the store was rather busy and therefore hard to hear Voiceover. So I was designated the trainer for my sister I think until her in-store training. I noticed that her low-battery notification doesn't appear to be read out by Vo either. I have a 13-inch Mac Book and our systems appear to differ slightly in the position of things, but I'm still able to navigate hers with no problem. Just this morning as I was checking my personal email account, I got a Twitter notification which was spoken. Here's what I'm wondering. Is the low-battery notification located in the same area as these other notifications, i.e., the Twitter and Facebook notifications along with the Do Not Disturb feature? I even tried lowering my display brightness to 0 percent, as recommended by Apple but still no dice. I'm perfectly willing to write to accessibility@apple.com about this. I'm not angry here, just a bit puzzled. After all, everything else on my Mac has been working well.

By Justin on Sunday, February 16, 2014 - 12:08

Hello Jake, I have a 15 inch MacBook pro, Mid 2012. Anyway, I don't receive the low battery notification either. If I remember properly, on an older MacBook that I have, it would sometimes say that the battery would switch to reserve power sometime after like 4% or so, I'm not exactly sure on this. If you can, download the app, Battery monitor from the AppStore. It's completely accessible, and you can monitor the percentage of your battery, temperature, how many charge/discharge cycles are left in your battery, etc. HTH!

By Ekaj on Sunday, March 16, 2014 - 12:08

Just wanted to update this thread. I think I may have discovered the audible low-battery alert. I was on Twitter just a few minutes ago when one of those notification images popped up. Thinking this might be the low-battery one, I went into Menu Extras and checked the status. Voiceover then said "alert from System UI Server," and then read out the low-battery status. I escaped out of the Menu Extras, and the alert was spoken again. This was at 2 percent. So it appears that I have to be in Menu Extras in order to actually hear Voiceover say "low battery." I guess I was expecting this notification to be like the one on my Dell laptop, which actually went off twice and played a sound in addition to announcing the battery level. But this is rather interesting. I wonder if there's a way to hear more than one low-battery alert on here. Guess I'll have to try it out. I'm kind of afraid to actually go into the battery settings themselves, because I don't want to mess something up. I'll also try and investigate the Low-Battery Monitor.

By cool cat on Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - 12:08

I have downloaded about 10-12 battery apps this weekend. I downloaded a paid app called "low battery alert" and it doesn't work.The best app I have found so far is Battery HD+, I really like how you can set it to get a notification at 5% intervals going up or down, but it' only works some of the time. Another app called Ebatt sounded promising, it didn't work either. I wonder if IOS 11 made it more restrictive for battery apps. I think I heard that.

By Justin on Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - 12:08

Hi,
I've used Coconut battery on my macbooks and it works great for checking the percentage from time to time.
Be aware, if you want to check the battery of a connected iPhone you need to connect the device to your Mac using the lightning cable. Then you can your phone's battery stats.

By cool cat on Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - 12:08

I did a quick search on the applevis website and found the thread title I was looking for. I didn't realize this was a Mac thread. I'm looking for a good low battery notifier for the Iphone. I shall be more carefull next time. lol